Seven
by Winkaku
Summary: Necessity is the mother of invention; lamentation
1. sins

A/N: the inspiration for this story is in one of my earlier pieces called "seven sins" as well as in Portal, RvsB and once again the writings of author Ceris Malfoy. This story is a glimpse of what I've always come to think of Screamer, his mind works so fast, and from personal experience with my more-so unmedicated days, I can tell you quite confidently that fast ins't always _good_.

Sins of The Living

"_When the gods have abandoned you and all hope is lost, when the world catches fire and all around you crumbles and blackens and burns; stand tall and make everyone remember your name." _- The ballad of the rage of Unicron, the warrior god of death.

To see them working in such a cadence was nigh unprecedented and more than just… unusual.

They were always bickering, always talking in the background… and always screaming, fighting; they never worked as one and there were just so many of them.

They moved fast too, strangely fast, incredibly fast, a _wrong_ kind of fast that had you clutching onto the edge of your seat wondering how you got there. Everything is everywhere, like a computer with too many windows open all running at once and so much so fast.

They were like people too; all as smart and quick as he, what the medics had called "rogue programs". Havoc on the psyche; personalities and programs that shouldn't exist and had you tripping over yourself to remember what's real or what's made up, what _they_ made up. There were dozens of them to begin with, trauma and experience and memory splitting them into more and more; hoarded, fetid little bundles of emotion and memory clawing about like angry infants and the guy who lives in the big grey building with the barred windows that nobody talks about because _bad things happen_.

There were a lot, there's more now, the last time he'd run diagnostics there had been a report of at least 374 rogue personality programs and related anomalies running through his processor; not counting those that had avoided the detection systems or jumped ship on him. Really, he should keep better track of them but as long as the more dangerous ones remained under lock and key the jumpers were none of _his_ problem… except for that one time… and the other times before that and after that. A strict schedule of thorough de-fragging of his processors eliminated the knock-offs and kept him relatively mentally functional so he really couldn't complain.

No, his concerns were limited to the more dangerous escape artists; should _they_ get loose… well, bad things happen.

Fun...but bad.

Indeed, there were many facets to his being, many minds in one and more.

_The First Sin, Sloth; Why should I bother with you? You do everything I want on your own..._

"_We created blades to kill and are in turn killed by blades."_

Delta was the head of the throne of cold science and logic, the chill serpent that bites the bosom of its savior for that is it's nature. Always thinking, always testing and building no matter the cost, science and intelligence in its purity with neither restraints nor ethics to murk the way of progress. Delta could do the impossible with nothing and make you pray you're dreaming, a scheming wraith of terrible machinations quite happy to sit working on the worst of all things as the last of all things by your own hand, pleased to give you the lovingly handcrafted tools of your own demise and watch the noose tighten with the threads of time. A double dealer, giving not for profit but for fun, for idle entertainment, for sitting back to watch whole nations come apart at the seams in a blaze of glory and crumble. Delta and his kin are the unseen web weavers in the dark, writing fates with the utmost precision.

_The Second Sin, Lust; I know everything you want... I will make it real..._

"_The mad lovers, the waltz of the entwined thorns, those who taint both themselves and everything around them."_

Phi; the seducer, the manipulator and user was a honeyed wine spiced with decadent poison, a creature that could bend and break a dozen mechs and have them all come crawling back for more. The whisperer into the ears of fools and madmen and geniuses alike, the thin see-through black satin _made_ for temptation and all too good at concealing a golden tipped dagger. The thing about Phi and it's ilk was that despite them all _knowing_ of the fine edged knife stropping the lace with a lovely purr, they came for it and they _wanted _it. Addiction personified, high grade walking, Phi would pour desire down wanting mouths like the sweetest drink, a subtle burn with the richest flavor; eating them alive from the inside out. With a sway of lascivious ivory and scarlet the world would dip, with a purr the world would keen and with a fine toothed smile along plump aristocratic lips whispering lies like honey and truths like acid, kissing the ears with everything you ever wanted, the world would crumble.

_The Third Sin, Pride; everything is after you and only you of course._

"_The thorns of the rose, they spread like fire and spilled across the seas like disease, withering all it touches."_

There were so many like Sigma as well, fear and phobia, intense paranoia that painted eyes on your back and a dagger in your chest. Sigma and her kin were vast and various but in the end their origin lay in fear; in the dark, beyond closed doors and sharp corners and the little black boxes that they liked to put him in. Sigma had him painting the walls with blood to keep the monsters from closing in on him. She had him scrambling to offer life to the dead that screamed and called for him inside his head. Sigma could turn paradise into hell with a thousand deaths, the reaching dark, behind her footsteps followed everything you couldn't see; everything you ever were afraid of and more. She was the first leap into the madness of the unreal, the lost little girl running in circles in the dark dead woods, covered in red and wide eyes crying. Contemplating, fearing, the prickle up your spinal struts the pounding fluttering spark so desperate for release, the shakes, the twitch the nerves cut raw; where oh where might the big bad wolf wander.

Right behind you.

_The Fourth Sin, Envy; I want what I cannot have and cannot know and I want it now._

"_The temptress sisters from whose lips spill only lies, whose silver laced tongues poison the eyes."_

Then there were ones like Gamma, the liar, so full of lies it doesn't know the truth anymore. Gamma would spew nonsense for hours without knowing it, lies that would turn fair weather into delusions and love into envy into rage against everything it can never understand. It was so many lies, you can't even tell if it's trying to lie anymore or just desperate to tell the truth but it _can't_, rather a pathetic creature. Gamma was the twisted shadows toying with you behind grey silk and dusk, the mad crying deceiver, so much a liar it was a lie in and of itself.

_The Fifth Sin, Greed; give me everything you have._

"_The regenerator, the consumer, the dried up oceans."_

Then there are those like Beta, those that know only pain, feel and perceive only pain. They shake and they wail but they know not guilt nor sadness or remorse. They were the ones born of punishment and depravity, sin and sadism, of weeks of hunger and a lifetime of untreated wounds and sickness. They were the ones born on the streets and gutters of the slums of Koan and fostered and nourished within the heart of Vos, within an academy of dark corridors full with pride and fools ilk and eventually within the ruins of all. They are the sad creatures that languish in the dark and they are the most dangerous of all; they make you pity, make you think, make you want to care and worst of all they make you believe that there may be even the slightest capacity for goodness in the caterwaul of cries and the eerie chittering of rocks on sandpaper just beyond the veil of seeing. Beta and it's kind were as simple as they were tragic; they know nothing, only pain.

_The Sixth Sin, Gluttony; nothing you give will ever be enough, nothing I take from you will either._

"_The resilient, the swift, the arrow through the heart, the outstretched hands that multiply and scream for more; the death sentence."_

There were those like Omega, zealous and ever full of envy, taking and devouring, trying to fill an unending pit and void that would never be satisfied. It was hunger, it was unending throbbing painful want born of total deprivation. Reaching out, stealing, grasping, clawing, can't get enough can't make it go away, can't fill the hole in me. Omega was as sad a creature as he was dangerous and treacherous and ugly and so utterly completely simple.

_The Seventh Sin, Wrath; come close little one and pray._

"_The black cloak, the ticking clock, the cleansing flames, the finality; ashes to ashes."_

Epsilon, the most dangerous of the children of hate was the pit of blackness itself reaching up and out towards your neck and spark with clawed hands grasping, never letting go. Epsilon is the ken of suffering, knowing only rage hate and pain and the means to inflict it. Unlike most others of it's kind though, Epsilon took joy in himself and his doings, so few of any of them, if at all, knew joy; no matter how twisted. Yes, Epsilon knew joy despite it's being and that is what made the torturer so dangerous. Those of hate would soon as suckle the energon from their own severed limbs if it meant surviving the dark another day to finally get the chance to strike back. Driven by sheer hate, the depths of what they could do, what they _would do_, was shocking even to the other decepticons. Epsilon would gladly tear a mech limb from limb to sate some wild fancy, gut them, rip and cut them and bathe in their energon blood, lapping it up and drinking it in with an almost sparkling like glee while Delta carefully dissected and categorized each piece removed from the whole, the many others clamoring in the dark spaces of his mind and writhing; he knows, he's done it before.

As an infant abandoned to the slums of Koan at the tender age of five he had clawed his way through life; by the age of six he had already offlined, cannibalized and dismantled his own kind, supped on their very life-blood and dying mass if only to quell the ache in his belly. He could dissect a mech down to the nutritional value of their parts and lines. By the time he was six and a half he had well and truly learned and lived the worst ways of Cybertron, her people and the festering hell that was Koan; he had been used, abused and beaten in the most horrifying ways. They had taken his home from him when he was five, they had taken his food from him with his security and what little love he had known at the time; he remembers the grayed shell of a mech he had been reluctant to leave at that time. Not truly understanding death at that point it was only the constant aloneness and the building hunger that eventually forced him from the mechs corpse. He remembers that dirty alleyway and the looks of those who ambled passed him and the desperate fear and pain that had him licking up what he could of the mechs dried energon before fleeing into the darkness.

He's uncertain but that corpse may have been his creator...

They took his trust and ruined it, they took his hope and murdered it; every aspect of a decent loving _sane_ creature had been taken and twisted beyond recognition. By autobot, by decepticon, by neutral alike; our ivory towers crumbled.

He had lost his chastity rather unpleasantly to a gang of drunken miner grounders when he was somewhere into his sixth vorn of living.

By the time he was seven he was well and truly glitched beyond repair, all potential for proper moral and emotional programming, for sane rationalization, had been stripped of him. He had become mentally stunted in a way, unable and unwilling to see, hear or think in anything but the darkest ways. Murder and death were normal, rape and pain were normal, subterfuge and hate and evil in the worst of ways were as normal and acceptable as a simple scientific cause and effect reaction. They were fact.

At the age of 9 vorns he had been abducted and forced into service as a pleasure-bot, collared like an animal, in one of the seedier houses; a rare breed were seekers in Koan. He fought, so they beat him. He bit and thrashed, so they filed his teeth down and cut off his claws. He screamed, so they tore his vocalizer.

He's not sure of his age at the time, there were explosions and that was all that mattered. They were dead, he was gone, the rest is history.

So he runs.

He had to become smarter, faster, powerful in every deadly sense of the word and he put every ounce of his being into just that. He raised himself, fed himself in mind and body; barely a youngling he could outsmart and outperform mechs over four times his age and be just as cruel if not even more so. It had been his undeniable extraordinary intelligence and insatiable drive that had elevated him from the slums of Koan to Vos and eventually to the very pinnacle itself; the towers of the Iaconian elite.

That was the day he'd met Skyfire; an elite and a gutter mech, no one would have thought it and no one approved it, yet somehow Skyfire didn't care, somehow the bumbling oaf of a sweet-sparked shuttle had learned to toe the line of his madness and pierce the veil with his too-large strangely soft hands. He had loved in his own way, with what little he knew of it and had, for the first time in far too long, been loved in return.

It was weird.

It couldn't last, everyone knew it, _they_ knew it too.

They'd lived together, worked together and nearly died together... they'd sparked together... new life in his chest, a flutter and an electric silk along his insides. He'd been terrified, didn't know, couldn't hide from the strange feeling growing inside. The carrier mechs were all dead, had been so for _so_ long; slaughtered by word of the council and religious nonsense to make way for the allspark and the power its possessor would lord over all of them. He didn't even know what he'd had, what he'd done; perhaps the ultimate act of treason.

Then came the storm, the frozen blanket of white death, pain and static that had taken Skyfire from him. He'd searched for so long, too long, and had eventually been forced to retreat to Cybertron; leaving Skyfire behind had been painful beyond anything he could understand. Half dead from exhaustion, lack of food and exposure he had begged; first the academy of Iacon, then the military, then the senate and finally even the council itself: **help me**.

There were ugly whispers; the military drone that murdered the elite.

They locked him away in one of their elite containment facilities, they ignored his cries for his lost love and his pleas fell upon deaf ears; he was in another small, dark box...was this Koan? Their treatment of him reaches new lows, he is but a vessel for their contempt.

He felt like he was dying inside.

He had been left to rot, left to fester in madness and sorrow with no medical care as sickness, abuse and starvation and his inherent glitches took hold. All records of his existence were expunged by the academy, his patents and inventions stolen, his almost-life ruined, his future and his love taken.

Then one night, in a cloak of dank dark and quiet and pain his body had shook and convulsed as the sickness inside of him seemed determined to make an appearance. His chest plates parted, lines burst in fits of static, fluids, and blood and screaming until the object had been painfully extruded from his body with claws, cries and shuddering spasms. Never had he experienced such pain before, such body wrenching pushing-fear- _where's Skyfire I want Skyfire __**please!**_

It was far too early to have happened, he'd had far too little food, shelter and care; the birthing alone had almost killed him. He lay in his blood, coming back to consciousness unto a rust red pool of his rotted and starved internals and his own stillborn infant.

It was then that he'd understood what had happened and it was then that the guards came for him, for the dead grey frame of the child he cradled to be taken to the incinerator.

He'd screamed until his vocals snapped.

His spark itself bore scars now, a great black gouge upon its quartz crystal core.

He would never bear again.

That was the day he gave himself unto his others, the slow descent into madness that much quicker, that much more painful, that much more necessary for survival. There would be whole vorns of darkness, of distant cries and silence in poorly lit halls and the burning spinning of his spark. Vorns alone, vorns in the dark, vorns held to heel beneath the abuse of the insatiable. Broken though his body may have been the undeniable countenance of rage, of smelting fires barely contained behind cracked bloody optics, the corona of a sun, never wavered; pride and hate never faltered. Chained and beaten and all but dead that rage became a mantle of heat-haze that breathed like a beast and grew like a dying star. It loomed like torture, stalked like teeth in the dark and fed his frame when the wardens would not.

_-I hate therefore I exist-_

The guards grew to fear him, their shifts came to pass his little out of the way cell less and less until footsteps rescinded unto silence.

Should his molten gaze shutter, should unconsciousness creep as chains clattered in the dark, he would swear he felt the watchful eyes of an amused golden clad lover at his back and armored hands upon his emaciated shoulders, a phantom caress and an unspoken promise as he slept. A longing, a lover only in dreams, perhaps the last bitter writhing of a mind so very deprived. He would spend vorns wrapped in that sweet delusion of a wild winged lover, until the day came that it too would fade unto the shadows with nought but a lingering not-there touch and sigh for comfort. There was the anticipation of fate in the dank air now, a copper tang along broken teeth that made his eyes burn that impossible little bit brighter.

Decepticon raids would see his prison broken, his chains cut and his vendetta unleashed; it would be a day that no one would ever forget. He had broken free of his prison in Iacon amidst the midnight raids and ran and killed and butchered until energon deprivation and exhaustion brought him to his knees in the very heart of Vos.

The once thriving city of seekers and crystal spires had been bombed into the ground by the frightened councils words, grown mechs murdered, younglings slaughtered in mass graves and the _sparklings._

The cruel death of Vos was perhaps the true start of the war.

He had become a decepticon simply due to the fact that it was they who had found him first, several vorns after the destruction of the cities and his cell, a homicidal wraith wandering the ruins of Vos, and decided he might be useful.

Nothing was good enough, nothing would _**be**_ good enough; not the prime's head he'd torn from his ornamented shoulders nor the tortured cries of every last senator and councilman he'd systematically hunted down like frightened sniveling animals.

Mutilation and destruction, desecration and dismemberment and disembowelment on a scale unthinkable, corpse after corpse after beaten broken pile made nought but bloody remnants of screams, pain and terror; no mercy... yet no satisfaction; it will _never_ be enough...

The unknown murderer of saint and sinner alike, the open-air secret that was an unspoken assassin. He had been a story-like figure, swift death, a reaper among the wreckage. If only they had _known _what they had found, that they bargained with Unicron himself insatiable. He could see in their leader-warlord's eyes the madness that begged pain and blood, see far beyond his pretty words of freedom. Freedom? Freedom meant nothing to him, all he had left was his hate and he would make sure all the world around him would know it too.

Despite it all, now, he so dearly wishes to believe those words, even as the decepticons themselves fall unto corruption.

He stayed because that was just how things went; he had nowhere to go and that haunting want and hunger had pushed him higher. He had stayed because in desperation, as the city of Vos was condemned, with what sanity he had managed to drudge up in a more pleasant life, he had pushed his two young hastily self-appointed wards onto a decepticon transport ship to get them out of the genocide he knew would come; no matter how much the two hated him for it. An inscrutable act of mercy, perhaps simply the inherent drive to save what little he could of his frame-kin, it mattered not. They were all just a memory now, clear skies and younglings laughter, fettered away by the enforcers and black halls and fire.

That and there wasn't much else he could coherently do at the time either.

Make no mistake though, he had fought his way to the top in every task with broken teeth and shattered claws, blood, disturbing cunning and the sheer blatant refusal to die. He would hold the whole of the decepticon army together with quick wit and powerful action and sheer force of will as time and time again Megatron would drive them unto the very brink of extinction, leaving Starscream to pick up the pieces of himself and everything around him and put them all back together even stronger than before. They hated him, they mocked him, at times they feared him and at others they respected him; the warrior in the shadows of time and tyranny. A wild creature as stubborn as he was intelligent, as powerful as he was swift; a devastating combination of feral prowess and cunning all wrapped up in the most beautiful frame; totally untouchable to them.

In the sky and on the land, he was the embodiment of the line they could not cross, and like a mad pyre in the dark, he kept them safe.

Always burning.

The lynch-pin of the entire decepticon army.

Truly though, much of what he could and would do, of all that he would toss upon the flames, was quite shocking to the others, sometimes even Megatron himself; that thought was amusing to no end. Much of his time after his role in the death of Vos and Iacon had been a violent haze of sedatives, a beast chained to the floor and a howling madness void of all coherency, a golden clad caress along beaten broken faceplates and burning eyes.

Though for some odd reason he does remember several mechs specifically.

Megatron of course had been the stoic overseer, never quite letting it show just how much the demon scared him. Megatron had seen the raving madness beaten from him, the violence and the shakes drugged out of him and the murderers tied to the ground with stasis cuffs, shock collars and the generous metal chains and bindings used to secure cargo and small ships to the bay floors.

For that at least, Starscream could be thankful, that was one thing the old fool actually got right.

Try as he might though, the mech always left as stiff as the rafters above him and just as pale, always a few shades lighter, _they_ counted the nights by those colors... and funnily enough so had he and his figment. They say his armor is dusty corpse grey for all the things he's said and done; _we_ know different, _we_ know what he's seen..

Then there had been Soundwave; clearly incapable of shielding his processor Starscream was to be fully examined and his mind "sorted" out. To this day they tell him that that was the only time they had ever heard the mech so much as curse let alone scream, apparently Starscream had brought out the mechs religious side as well; thrice damned by Primus indeed, how cute.

It had taken five days to work the bugs out of his system, to stop the random crashes, the tremors and the trauma loops, five days to make the pain cycles stuck into his processor stop. Seven days to recharge properly on his own, three days to make the screaming stop; his and _theirs_, to make _them_ fade with the seizures. Eight days to make the- _**this isn't real**_ -leave him alone. He doesn't talk about it but the slight shake and the bloodless grasping of his hands tell the story; he only looked once but like Pandora's box, you only _had_ to look _once_.

They had tried to make him do it again, to open that dilapidated blood stained door to that god forsaken hell, again. Everyone present in the command center at the time remembers with no little a mixture of chagrin and fear when Soundwave quietly asked permission to speak freely and, granted, promptly told Megatron to shove it up his aft.

Megatron couldn't bring himself to blame him for it.

He remembers a silver face, light like platinum, and full lips and fangs that moved and shone like mercury. He remembers skeletal finger-like ribbons that flowed and swayed and left fire on his frame. He remembers a reaching golden figment with a laugh like death, a touch like desire and a hunger that resonated so deeply with him on so many levels it hurt to think. He remembers and he wonders.

Finally there had been two others, two other faces he had recognized even in the throes of having lost it to the world the worst he ever had.

Thundercracker and Skywarp.

Perhaps the fools that be were trying to use their would be trine bond in hopes of stimulating some kind of a mental turn for the better. Those two, after all, were the ones he had so secretly and selfishly looked after since the day he'd first found them lost in the outskirts of the slums of Vos. The younglings that never knew of their guardian until the day he showed up out of nowhere, claiming bond with them and shoved them onto a decepticon transport ship, booted them from their home and enlisted them unto the ranks. They had hated him for it but they had survived because of it and that was good enough for him.

Why, he did not know.

They brought him rations, helped to tend his wounds when the fits stopped and the shakes weren't so dangerous. They spoke to him even though he couldn't understand or retain a word or a syllable of it. They eased stiff joints and cleansed what would eventually become just another scar despite the claws and reaching and -_don'ttouchthem- _they made the endless edge away when the drugs and the beatings could not.

Why, how, he did not know.

Maybe he had seen guilt on their faceplates, maybe remorse or sorrow or some form of elation in realizing that he really was sick, _so sick_, but sickness nonetheless meant hope for a cure.

Starscream would eat his wings before he let either of them fall into the trappings of his mind and body.

Somewhere in his spark he knew he would sooner shoot himself with Megatron's own alt-form than give those virulent multiplicative _things_ the satisfaction. He could agree to that no matter _how_ much _they_ tried to make it different and just how much _they_ would conspire against him to do it.

For them, _they didn't matter_.

The pyre is burning thin, the fuel is nought but ash and cinder; what would that blanket of unknown bring, that creeping darkness, should the firelight of his madness finally wink out of existence? He had carved his rage into the whole of their world and the very planet upon which they stood until it crumbled and wasted and blackened beneath the weight of it. He is so tired now.

_-That candle in the dark-_

He is the Decepticon SIC, a mech of approximately 22 vorns of age, disturbingly young, who had risen from nothing to become everything as a laughing jack of all trades. Truly, he was far too good at what he did; from Koan, to Vos, to Iacon and to the whole of their world.

Sparkling of an Autobot noble sire and a lower class seeker carrier.

Graduated top of his class in the science and military academies of Vos, Koan, Praxus, Altihex and Iacon.

Mastery level certified field-medic, surgeon, combat specialist, mortician, chemist, physicist, psychologist, mathematician, chaotician, weapons expert, computer expert, botanist, tactician, engineer, inventor, xenobiologist, explosives expert, economist, close-quarters combat specialist, long-range combat expert, systems theorist, arial ops expert, spec ops expert and a previous deep-space explorer. The list goes on and it's still growing.

Responsible for no less than 357,000,032 civilian deaths, 470,000,000 military deaths, the termination and mutilation of all senate, council and over half the Autobot elite forces. Played part in the destruction of 11,520 Autobot city capitals, 26,320 lesser Autobot cities and 42,330 Autobot townships. Co-responsible for 34 cases of genocide, accomplice to the Decepticons in countless acts of violence, terrorism, atrocity, espionage, treason and conspiracy.

Certified insane by 63 notable institutions, guilty of 22,147 individual acts of high treason and around 114,550 known counts of war crime.

Personally responsible for the fall of Iacon, Praxus, Helix and Altihex.

Personally responsible for the death and mutilation of Nova, Sentinel and Vector prime.

_-my love I am so tired-_


	2. virtues

A/N: Holy hell is this gonna be a hard one; something of an antithesis and a sequel to my other story "Seven". This story looks more toward the future, unlike the other which looked into the past; that makes it very difficult to write without injecting plot elements. One can speculate that someday their war does end, by who's hands or by what fortunes is as much for me to decide as for you and I'd like to keep it that way. Small pieces of this fic will make a lot more sense if you read "Seven" first.

Title: The Seven Of Virtue

Summary: They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, I suppose in this case the road to heaven is paved in utterly bad ones.

_The First of Virtue, Patience; I wait for the light beneath the edge of the door and I nurse it's glow with careful expectance._

_The quiet watcher, the waiting one, what he waits for he does not know, for the glimmer is soft and growing and terrifying._

Despite what many may believe, on some innate level, Starscream is a very patient mech. All be it not on the surface at all times, his temper is as renowned as his tantrums are loud and long and generally outright destructive.

But he could be patient.

He would wait through vorns of darkness and unfairness and coldness with naught but dead hope and keening want in a small broken frame with too-little wings. He would wait through eons of blackness and pain with only the insubstantial caress of big, kind hands and white interstellar grade armor that wasn't really there. He would wait through whole wars that would span his world and others across the stars with no sign of ending.

He waited for love, he waited for freedom and he waited for vengeance; now he waits for his lordships sense to catch up with him... it's going to be a long wait for that mech.

He would wait and he would be patient.

Sort of.

_The Second of Virtue, Chastity; The shy lover who waits and leaves all at the door._

_The slim virgin, the loving maiden; all in tatters but still so full of pride and in a sense still so utterly untouched._

He may have been used. He may have been beaten, abused and utterly destroyed in body but his beauty, that primal innocence, is still pure, still there beneath the scars. He had only ever given himself freely twice and in their defense they had both been young, drunk and, in a way, stupid. The second time he'd been half insane from too many vorns in that blasted cell in prison and he'd probably been hallucinating from tainted energon.

Through the haze of alcohol and time and dank dark prison chambers he remembers none of it, though his body remembers all of it, like so many other things; his body never forgets. Cosmic black mass-flesh remembers soft touches and laughing sighs, the cant of his hips remembers nervousness and embarrassment as he sits on the edge of a cracked chair. Eyes remember a dim blur and a soft smile, quicksilver lips, and trying so hard to capture the image forever.

His body remembers and his spark rejoices in golden loops of ecstasy.

His wing-mates still embarrass him with their antics; they would remind his body of love and his ridged ashen cheeks would flush to a mahogany silk kiss.

_The Third of Virtue, Humility; the quiet laborer in the dark who knows not thanks or gratitude but always stands with dignity._

_Sacrifice and diligence unyielding, perfection with each flawless stroke of an artists brush, completely, totally unnoticed._

Not many knew that it was Starscream who had built his chosen lords fusion cannon and built it perfectly. Not many knew that said lord still came to him for repairs, systems upgrades and detailing and that he did it all quietly and perfectly. Well, sometimes quietly.

When the Nemesis all but shutdown for the night, when all but the nightshift had gone to their chambers, a silent ghost stalked the sunken vessel. It went from room to room, console to console and task to task. It made sure the reactors were cooled and functioned properly, it sorted through system after system and updated information, organization and security protocols. It would work for hours, checking for the hint of a spy-drone, the wispy footsteps of a thief and counting out energon cubes in the storehouses and hidden caches, inspecting the quality and removing impurities until it shone an electric amethyst. It would run repairs, work the dust from the labs and sweep the halls for anything and everything; eyes like pink-pricks in the dark, unforgiving. Sleepless nights, an empty berth in it's lonely room, check after check after check in the dusky dimness.

It never said a word about itself.

_The Fourth of Virtue, Understanding; I cannot forgive, I cannot forget, but I do try to understand._

_The solemn judge, the tired sentry. He who observes the coals and tempers the hot irons and whets the blades with silent care._

For every prisoner that graced their cages, for every captured mech who's tortured screams had echoed the halls, he had been there and he had rejoiced. He had watched them rot and watched them cry and curse and always he had forgiven them and his lordship their reason for being, their reason for hating. He accepted it and no matter how loudly his own mind tortured him with memories of a dark prison and the black alleyways that came before, their faces began to make him forget.

Then one day he looked upon their broken bodies and understood them.

So he would end their stay quickly; a kindness never offered to himself.

_The Fifth of Virtue, Generosity; the unspoken, the unknown, the all too unusual light in the dark._

_The rattling of keys in an upturned palm, the quiet of the storm, to quench a dead mans thirst in the desert and pour water on his bleached bones._

There were nights when the stores were dismal and he would fatten his trine-mates rations on his own, there were nights when he would keep their punishments as his. There were days when the Stunticons needed council, when he would read to them and teach them as the father they never had would. He would tutor Wildrider until he could focus, he would waylay Vortex until the mech could think. He would take everything their abusive gestalt leader, the sadist mech he had bound them to, could throw at him and think of his lordship and the broken parody he had created of himself. He would watch over Breakdown so the mech could sleep properly at night.

Sometimes, at twilight, he would lay in the medi-bay and envision broken gestalts wandering deafly through the halls alongside starving soldiers. He would imagine full trines split open and mourning, think of Soundwave without his cassettes or Reflector without the pieces that made him whole.

He would lay awake despite Hook's grumbling and repairs and wrack his processors for ways to circumvent his lordships fallacies and put together plan after plan to make sure everyone came home.

_The Sixth of Virtue, Mercy; be swift._

_A throat slit quickly and precisely, a prisoners stay ended, an execution performed with dignity and grace._

There would come a day when it would all have to end, when the guilted sting of loyalty and gratitude wouldn't be enough to properly stay his hand. When those still dear to him would matter more than the one he once stood closest to.

He held the keys and he knew it.

They should be focusing on energon production and purification, on resource allocation and sustainable practices and putting a real end to the war. Why did they need to steal what they were better off making? Why did they need to make enemies of the inconsequential and then dally with their games? Why did they need to starve when they could be eating, to dump bodies when they were already so painfully few in number and could be caring properly for the wounded? Why burn when you could finally, _finally_, sow.

The council was dead, their people were decimated, their homes; their very planet destroyed.

Even he knew it was enough.

_The Seventh of Virtue, Happiness; a child at dawn._

_The little one with tiny wings who plays in sunbeams in his mothers arms and giggles under kisses as he takes his first steps._

Who knows?

Despite _them_, despite the many that made the whole, there were times, little snippets in his existence, when he remembered what he was and how it all began. Those times, usually after a good de-frag and a long stay in the brig cell that had become his second home, when that rare actual _quiet_ would clear his head and he could think; those times were... nice. When some little triumph would draw his processor to the ground and hold tight and he could see. He would remember his carriers color, a mahogany sheen in sunlight reflected off of the crystal towers of Vos, and the touch of a loving spark and bond. He could almost remember his carriers voice. It felt nice.

He remembers re-building the Stunticons, putting them together piece by rotten piece, tying them together and nurturing their broken forms until they'd taken their first steps. He remembers setting them loose with a stab of hate and a prick of pain. He remembers the first time he had been proud of them; Vortex had outwitted Rumble during a prank.

Thinking back on all of his work, his lies and his assassination attempts, he can only think of his trine-mates and how they held each other when they thought they were alone. There would be a stab of jealousy and it would make him wonder just what there was to have been jealous of. He'd decided to preserve it for later study.

One night they'd spotted him watching them and Skywarp had told him to come lay with them for the night. Starscream usually slept separate from them. That night he slept with good company for the first time and decided he'd liked it. Not that he'd go around saying it.

Sometimes he would work at the consoles until dawn and he wouldn't catch himself stroking Ravages sides or the felines static purr.

One day he'd caught SpyGlass staring at his wings oddly and taken the little mech for his first flight, much to his excitement and the chagrin of his mates. He woke the next day covered in folded paper birds called cranes, approximately nine hundred and ninety nine of them made from outdated flimsiplast datapads and one other that he'd later found stuck to his aft; he still didn't get the joke though...

The day he'd pulled Skyfire out of the ice, the day he'd tried so hard, so madly, to push the mech away- _don't look at me don't look at what i've become don't look at what __I am- _ was the day he' dreamt of candles and smoke and little lights gone out. How far had he fallen, had all of them dropped. He'd knowingly given himself unto a farce and it hadn't mattered to him then. So why did it hurt now?

Why did it hurt to look upon his lordship and see the faces of the many mechs who'd destroyed him so?

_-"when you look at us, see what we were and what we are, do you laugh or do you weep?"-_

Why did it hurt to look at the Prime and the autobots and see fate laughing as that red emblem stared back at him and he would end up seeing everything backwards? He would watch his love walking into their arms and know they'd do the mech better than he ever could even as he held tight to a small piece of underdeveloped protoform so strongly that its soft malnourished metal made him bleed. And it would hurt.

How he had raged that night, it had almost become legendary.

Day after day his lordships beatings became more frequent, more desired and less deserved.

He worried his trine-mates, sampled strange glances from Soundwave and bore the weight his peers placed upon his shoulders with quiet pride. He wore his broken visage like a mantle of power that defined him utterly.

It didn't matter; he'd built himself a house of cards with his lordships claiming hands around his neck, around his arms, his waist, his-

It didn't matter, the ground was shaking and he'd just have to pick up the pieces again when they fell.

Small children that those pieces were, playing cards wandering in the maelstrom quiet of his mind, the eye of the storm, who toddled about no matter how much he tried to ignore them or how painful and terrifying they were to be seen. They grew in him, tiny like little buds and looked like their crinkled edges might flower one day.

It was all too organic as far as he was concerned.

Skyfire would love it.

That night he dreamt of dancing cards that swayed like lovers in the quiet. Would that their one day be lovers again? That there be small children and fair weather and families to hold them dear. That blackness and madness no longer became necessary, that screams and grasping hands became ill memory.

That everything he ever knew could be forgotten, blown away like those little playing cards.

He was getting tired of waking, of candle smoke and blankets of ash and black dusk; his dreams were so much better these days.


	3. language skills

A/N: I have never transitioned well between characters, my thought processes and writing styles are as stubborn, unmoving and pervasive as my moral code and eccentricities. Also, my thanks to the reviewer who corrected my earlier mistakes concerning the Stunticons and Combaticons. I always get them mixed up; I'll have to go back and figure that cluster-frack out someday. Also, as far as the numbers are concerned, do you try a general for the people he kills personally or all the people he forced his men to kill as well? We all think of the excuse of following orders as a cowards way out but the thing no one tells you about is the price of saying no and standing up for yourself when it's all just called insubordination and treason. I know little of Cybertron but I do believe that such an advanced species is capable of spreading and multiplying beyond the limitations of it's native environment in many ways. Plus I have this silly habit of dialing everything up to eleven. This chapter was inspired by the movie "Pontypool" and it's use of words as a vector for viruses.

( A small challenge to expand on this story for those looking for trouble: we all know that in war it is a good idea to keep intelligence records on the enemy. I wonder what the Autobots might have on Starscream and what would happen if Skyfire found it.)

3rd chapter of "Seven".

Question: How do you stop a fusion reaction?

Answer: You don't.

Have you ever thought of a word, any word be it simple or complex, until for some reason it just didn't make sense anymore? It could be a word you used everyday or a word written across the bricks of a building or something you remembered but after a time it just falls apart until the very sound of it in your mind becomes alien and even it's meaning becomes nonsense.

This had always been his second's nature; convoluted, paranoid and stubborn to a fault; a word that didn't make sense anymore and just kept looping around the mind until you doubted the world.

People often wondered how he managed his second, despite the perverse nature of his processor function and just how deeply it ran. Starscreams mind was constantly working, constantly unraveling things, even itself. Truth be told, after a good de-fragging he was, at his most basic level, surprisingly sane. It just took a lot of cautious handling and several supercomputers to get him there. He was used to the routine.

The Decepticons as a whole were an impromptu faction of dissidents, the unwanted of society, made to work and created to die by and for the opulence of the council and the upper class. As a result of the mass production and special requests to manufacturers the majority of mechs under their banner were perpetually broke ne'er do wells riddled with glitches and sick of trying to survive starvation wages and unhealthy work hours and dangerous environments. They never had the money or permission for education or self advancement; meaning that they did not have the intellectual resources of the upper caste Autobots who could both afford it and be allowed it. Megatron had seen his own men drop dead from curable diseases and crippled by repairable damage. He had no doubt that Starscreams ailments could be cured or even all together erased but Decepticons did not have that luxury. It was one of the last remaining betrayals of the 'Golden Age' and the Allspark and it was still killing his men; it infuriated him.

Knowledge is power and ever did the Autobot council hoard it's power.

Functionalists dictated a mechs life by his frame and sponsor, just who had the right to know and do what and the few who profited loved it, enforced it and lifted their perch higher and higher on the backs of the masses; after all they were made for that purpose by the Allspark. This is what made Starscream so valuable; he was one of the few mechs who broke all the rules time and again and got away with it. He was born, not created or commissioned, he was not constrained by rules as he lived in Koan and in Koan there were no rules. He did not follow a military career despite being a military build and despite powerful social pressures, he became a scientist. He did not copy information to himself as dictated, he consumed it and mastered it and went looking for more in any way he could get it. Simply put, unforeseen circumstances conspired for the natural birth and development of a mech with the frame of a military build and the processor of an advanced scientist build in a process completely free of the artificial interference of the ruling caste despite it's best efforts to eliminate such a possibility. Yet still, he was a flawed mech at code. As far as Megatron was concerned it was all further proof that Unicron must have played some role in the mechs creation and was out there somewhere laughing his godly aft off. When mechs called that seeker a pitspawn most of them meant it.

One might accuse Megatron of uncalled for violence and brutishness where his second was concerned. Slag them, they didn't know Starscream like he did. They didn't know that complex heaving processor filled to the brim with burning and turning until the time came when violence was the only thing it understood. Which is why violence was usually his first response; a sharp pain to clear the mind and generate focus. The act bred understanding in what was left of that one sane creature buried under mountains of fragmented twisted data. Hate and pain created clarity, rage sharpening it to a laser intensity like the sharpness of that final killing blow. Time and again he would state his position over the mech. I am here. I see you. I hear you. I will hold you to your word, your position, and when the time comes I will bring the final end for you. He could judge the level of processor degradation in his second by the response alone. The fervor in his begging, the incoherency of his rage and the calling of the void hidden behind too bright optics. The void that once sought to fill itself with knowledge and now tries to drown itself in blood. Megatron could find out all he needed to understand his second's mental state in that raising of fists and claws.

That did not mean it was in any way easy.

When pressed and the madness would ooze out between the cracks like pus from a wound and it was decided it must be dealt with, a whole dance routine of strategies came into play. Comfort and care meant nothing to _them_, a soft touch and a quiet whisper had more double meanings than logically possible. No, _they_ knew only violence and it's purity and responded to it in kind and it was the only way to deal with them. It didn't matter if he had to beat the mech into spare parts so he could safely strap him down for de-fragging and treatment. When they came to actual nock down drag out fights the events were long, loud and legendary, generally a bloody mess on both parts. More than once had Megatron thanked Primus for his huge gladiator build.

Violence was a solid and unmistakable language that had taught him well and served him just as good when words became naught but hissing in the hot air. Everyone understood the universal language of violence, even the long dead councilmen could not deny it. Would he wish there was another way? No, violence did not lie, it left no illusions of one's place in the world. It had burned their world to the ground but their world had deserved to burn; all of it.

So mechs can argue that he is unfair all they like, though none of them are stupid enough to question his way of handling the deranged seeker. His method of dealing with his seconds perversions has so far been the only one to pan out into success. His methods of argument were the only ones to ever breach the noble's doors and the hideaways of the senators.

It begs the question though, why go through all of this madness?

His seeker is a creature of so many talents and skills that, if he could, he would have chained the mech to a de-fragging repairs console and let it be at that. His many strengths were, however, tempered by his many faults; arrogance, a temper more volatile than Megatron's own, a mind more questionable than any he'd seen before, a terrifying drive that cried for blood, occasional crippling shortsightedness; the list went on and on and never once repeated itself. That was why, in those rare moments of clarity in the seekers life, the sheer mundane _sanity_ creeping below the surface was downright shocking. Not to mention disappointing. It was no wonder that Starscream couldn't even win a fight with himself when the mech beneath the rabble was such a weakling.

He could almost hear someone laughing at him when those times came about.

Starscream, the real mech, could tend to others with a startling care and compassion, one could almost see that tired countenance behind dim optics as it pushed aside wandering code and set itself to task. It was at these times that Megatron didn't know wether to feel disgusted or guilty.

So why bother?

It didn't come from any sense of owing the mech, the only thing he owed that bastard was a beating. It had a lot to do with his varied uses and talents, many of which were not found in mechs outside the Decepticon elite and never in such concentration. It also had a lot to do with his firm entrenchment at the very top of the Vosian social hierarchy in his army, a position, like all others, that he had lied, cheated and murdered his way into. A position he had earned and suitably dominated, that made him irreplaceable in the armada.

Perhaps it came from their most fundamental and shared reality of violence, that on such a simple level, no matter what state Starscream was in, they understood each other perfectly.

He would never admit but on some level he liked Starscream's constant testing of him, that their shared dynamics dissuaded dissent within the ranks like no other. He liked to watch his second turn his nose up to highgrade and laughed when the mech had it out with the mechs under them for their failures. He liked to wring the bastards pretty little neck and to watch all of the many various emotions that played across his face and wings.

Targeting and passion were as ingrained into his systems as violence; he was a gun former after all and what was a gun with no one to wield it, to point it in the right direction and fire. His sights were narrow and his power devastating, which is what made Starscream valuable the most. Perhaps all those years of fielding his own faults had taught him how to channel others but his second knew how to tease out the hate and pain from him like no other. The mech knew when and how to pull the trigger and just where to aim it.

He hated him for it, for just how quickly and thoroughly the seeker could breach every defense he had even from under a dozen layers of slag code.

Spreading outward, a cracked glass spiderweb of death reaching from one port to another; from planet to planet, from the many moons to the space between and across the stars. Their war would stretch long and far and still it did not end, it was not enough.

Sometimes we forget that we feel, that we cannot sleep when the nights are too dark or to hot or when rage fed energy picks its way under exhaustion and armor and there's nothing left to do but let it out. Violence was nearly all they knew and at times it was all they understood, like the people strangled by war and hate that they were, sometimes it was the only thing they could do. Like so many other painful things, Starscream knew it too and understood it, teasing out that pain with a puppet-masters care; just as Megatron had done to him.

It was sad, it was broken and it was all they had.

The language of violence.

To remember when enough is enough.


End file.
